But
when Wikileaks yesterday
published a list of top
targets to hurt U.S. national security, the site seemingly sealed
its own fate. Its Swiss bank account was closed,
and Wikileaks reportedly
lost the money in it (the bank contended that Wikileaks founder
Julian Assange lied in the paperwork, saying he resided in
Switzerland, which he does not).

Now the DNS Company, the web
listing organization which provided Wikileaks with
the right to use the domain name "wikileaks.org",
has terminated its
affiliation with the site. That means that attempts to reach
the site by domain name no longer succeed.

The site also
lost another
hosting service -- EveryDNS.net -- and has jumped to a mix
of Swiss and French hosting at the present. But France's
government is already moving to ban the site from its nations
servers.

Meanwhile the site is under a distributed denial of
service attack from
a "hacktivist" who goes by the moniker The Jester – or
"th3 j35t3r". On his Twitter feed, The Jester writes,
"TANGO DOWN - for attempting to endanger the lives of our
troops, 'other assets' & foreign relations."

An
earlier attack exceeded a modest 2-4 Gbps, but a Tuesday attack was
even more potent, reaching a mean 10 Gbps.

About the only way
to get to Wikileaks these days is via a Google search, which comes up
with its direct IP address, which is occasionally reachable,
depending on the current volume of fake service requests.

Facing
the possibility of his masterwork being taken offline and complete
loss of funding, Wikileaks founder
Julian Assange surrendered
to authorities in Britain on Swedish rape charges unrelated
to the recent leaks. He has warned his followers that if
anything happens to him while he is imprisoned, that a secret key
will be released which will unlock a distributed archived file
containing all the site's unreleased secrets.

One of Mr.
Assange's accusers in the Swedish sex crimes trial coincidentally
has ties
to the CIA. Mr. Assange was denied
bail, as he is to be extradited to Sweden for questioning on
outstanding allegations of rape, molestation and unlawful coercion.
When asked if he understood the ruling, he commented, "I
understand that and I do not consent."

Apparently the
matter was not left up to his determination.

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I have to say, there really wasn’t anything I read (at least what I read reported in the NY Times) that I would consider “damning” or showing some massive government conspiracy. I mean, nothing reported was said that any rational person couldn’t basically figure out on their own.

Gee, politicians and diplomats say “this guy isn’t so bad” in public, but then call him a dink in private conversations... Is anyone really surprised by this? That politicos tend to talk behind people’s backs? Gee, stop the presses.

As such, I just don’t see this claimed, massive government conspiracy to control us cira 1984.

What I do see is one nappy haired douche (and a bunch of low life turds that follow him) basically making it very hard for diplomats to do their jobs now. And we *do* want diplomats talking to each other. Now, instead of the traditional practice of two-faced politicians (which frankly has been the case since before the Romans) we will have a world-wide sense of gridlock in making comments with any frankness at all.

Oh, and show of hands, who here wouldn’t expect a douche that intentionally and continually spent his time trying to make *all* the government bodies on the planet feel uncomfortable and ineffectual in their rolls be “removed” from the playing field? Quite honestly I wouldn’t have expected anything less.

I totally disagree, I think the Wikileaks cables reveal the crux of our problems and struggles. It's absolutely necessary for Public to know this; clandestine actions and obscured policies that endanger everyone. This one for example:

"Three years later, it’s clear the Ethiopian invasion was a bad idea. The attack rallied Somalis of all stripes and politics against the invaders, ultimately boosting support for fringe Islamic groups that now had a clear enemy in the Ethiopians and their suspected American puppet-masters. Violence mounted as the Ethiopians settled in for a bloody, two-year occupation.

When the Ethiopians withdrew in 2009, the Islamists rushed to fill the vacuum. A year later, the Al Shabab Islamic group, successor to the Islamic Courts, conducted its first international terror attack. Last month, a Somali-born American teen plotted to explode a bomb in Portland. Today, U.S. Special Forces continue to target terrorists in Somalia. There are arguably more of them than ever, thanks in part to the botched Ethiopian invasion. “We’ve made a lot of mistakes and Ethiopia’s entry in 2006 was not a really good idea,” U.S. diplomat Donald Yamamoto said in March."

Vitaly, I agree with you on that specific example. There are things that we as the public need to see. However, once it becomes clear that actions you are making are hurting SPECIFIC individuals, you have an obligation to stop. When terrorist organizations are thanking you for what you've done you've crossed the line.

Even though we as a country believe in free speech, there still are types of speech that are prohibited. You can't yell fire in a crowded room. Why? Because it leads to imminent physical harm to other people. Thats exactly Assaunge is doing. His actions are putting people in IMMEDIATE physical danger. This isn't an abstract situation of "oh he's hurting our credibility". There are immediate direct and often fatal consequences of his actions. That is not acceptable and shouldn't be.

I was going to write a more extensive reply, but my friends just informed me that Julian Assange has published his new article,"Don't shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths", this article essentially reflects my position om this controversy in more coherent style.

again, its a reach to say that leak should surprise anyone except those who dont bother read the news over the last few decades.

africa is seriously f'd up place and anybody who messes around there usually regrets it and ends up with an even bigger mess.

some leakers take a bit of info, dig and do actual journalism to uncover connections - flush the truth out and give the reader a pic of the events. wikileaks is just trickling out overly sensationalized data, isnt working to verify any of it, isnt even trying to make a picture out of the data except to puff it up to show how evil the US and its allies are. yawn.

Absolutely necessary? Come on. Realistically, what are you doing about it now that you know *this* information?

I mean, if it is “absolutely necessary” that this information be known, it must mean that you, and others around you, are changing your lifestyle in some way, right? What *really* are you going to do with this information? Have you even bothered to email your representative and tell him how outraged you are that you read a secret document stating that American troops have done some “meany things” in Somalia? It costs you nothing to do and really is the absolute least effort you could put into this, so did you do it?

No, you haven’t. You haven’t done squat... except complain about America, and generally whine and mope in a web forum. Yeah, sure sounds like information that is “absolutely necessary” for you to know...

This is the problem in general with this notion that *all* information should be known by all the lazy, J6Ps that can’t be bothered (or worse intentionally will not) view it in the broader context. For the most part, *all* countries (save totalitarian states) do good and bad things to try to do what is best for themselves. Sometime it works out, some times it goes badly.

This kind of “reprehensible” stuff has been going on from the day this country was founded (and the day each other country was founded respectively.) Heck this stuff was going rampent when GWB was president and all the lazy arm chair quarterbacks pissed and moaned about it endlessly. Finally, the country elected the polar opposite to GWB in every possible way, and guess what? Same stuff is still going on. Honestly, who’s to blame in that case, we couldn’t possibly find a president to elect that was more different in every facet of being, yet all this stuff goes on with no difference, just like it has for centuries.

Yet all of a sudden, people are outraged because right now they get to read all the gory little tabloid; "he said, she said" details... Sheep.